San Diego, CA--On Tuesday, May 8, The Getty Foundation announced their selection of four San Diego institutions to be included in the second installment of the Pacific Standard Time initiative. The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD), Museum of Photographic Arts (MOPA), University of San Diego (USD), and The San Diego Museum of Art are receiving part of a total $5 million in grants awarded by The Getty Foundation to 46 Southern California cultural institutions. As part of this grand-scale collaboration, partners will present thematically linked exhibitions in September 2017.

The theme of this Pacific Standard Time series is LA/LA, focusing on Latin American and Latino art and the influence of Latino culture across Southern California, a perfect fit for San Diego’s border-side location.

In the first iteration of Pacific Standard Time, dubbed Art in L.A.: 1945-1980, 60 institutions organized more than 50 exhibitions designed to collectively tell the story of the birth of the Los Angeles art scene and how it became a new force in the art world. In the second iteration of Pacific Standard Time, the number of San Diego museums included in the initiative has doubled, speaking to our city’s rich cultural assets and strong Latin American influence.

"We are delighted that several San Diego institutions are participating in Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA,” said Deborah Marrow, Director of the Getty Foundation. “Pacific Standard Time has always been conceived as a region-wide initiative across Southern California. In 2011-2012, San Diego made a crucial contribution to the first initiative about art in LA in the postwar decades, and we look forward to the exciting exhibitions to come in 2017."

See below for a summary of the four exhibitions.

Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD)

Memories of Underdevelopment

Exhibition research support: $275,000

In collaboration with Mexico City’s Museo Rufino Tamayo and the Museo de Arte de Lima, MCASD will examine the responses of conceptual and performance artists —primarily in Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and Mexico—to the unraveling of the “modernization” project in Latin America. During the 1960s through the 1980s, artists addressed the failures of the region’s “transition to modernity” and its legacy of corrupt social and economic systems. They were also searching for alternative, non-museum based exhibition practices to directly engage with local communities, incorporating popular strategies from film, architecture, and theater, and grappling with political oppression. The exhibition will shed new light on such well-known artists as Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Pape, as well as lesser-known artists in Colombia, Uruguay, Chile, and Peru. Along with paintings, sculptures, and videos, the exhibition will recreate a number of site-specific, ephemeral works for the first time in Southern California.

“MCASD has a long history of celebrating its geographic location at the edge of Latin America, going back to the earliest years of the Museum’s existence,” said MCASD’s David C. Copley Director and CEO, Hugh Davies. “When I became MCASD’s director in 1983, I couldn’t help but be struck by San Diego’s binational, bicultural environment, which led me to deliberately shift its point of reference from the traditional “west/east” axis to focus more intensively on the increasingly important “north/south” axis. We hope and believe that our future contribution to the Pacific Standard Time project will become a model for similar cross-institutional collaborations and uncover key avant-garde movements for our ever expanding, diversifying audiences.”

MCASD hopes to build on the success of its last Pacific Standard Time exhibition, Phenomenal: California Light, Space, Surface. More than 30,000 visitors came to see this large-scale showcase of 1960s and 1970s Light and Space artworks that filled the Museum’s two locations. The Getty granted MCASD $450,000 for Phenomenal, which included works from artists like James Turrell, Peter Alexander, Larry Bell and Robert Irwin—resulting in the largest exhibition in MCASD’s history.

The most recent generation of photographic artists in Mexico came of age in an era of profound political and social change, as the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) ceded power after seven decades. Drug wars, outward migration, and changing attitudes toward religion and traditional gender roles characterized this “post-nationalist” period. Inheriting the social reforms of the 1990s, artists such as Karina Juarez, Jose Luis Cuevas, and Luis Arturo Aquirre used a range of practices, from “straight” photography, to manipulated photographs, installations, and videos, to explore the fracturing of personal and cultural identities in the new Mexico, displacements that were both disorienting and liberating. Located in San Diego’s Balboa Park, MOPA will draw on its strong relationship with artists and organizations across the border for this project, and will also contextualize this work within broader international developments in photography.

“For the last two years, MOPA has been exploring the innovative photography being created in Mexico,” said Deborah Klochko, MOPA’s Executive Director. “It's a dynamic time of transition for photographic artists in that country and the Pacific Standard Time project is the ideal opportunity for us to highlight their work.”

The San Diego Museum of Art’s forthcoming exhibition, Indigenismos: Amerindian Inscriptions in the Art of the Americas aims to expand the art historical definition of indigenismo—the concern with peoples indigenous to a region. Often illustrated through Mexican modernism, this exhibition presents work from the nineteenth-century to the present created primarily in Brazil, Mexico, Peru, and the Southwest portion of the United States. Presenting indigenismos as a major catalyst for modernism in Latin American art, the exhibition willdeconstruct the movements meaning, examine its plurality, historical development, and its continued existence in contemporary art through historical, avant-garde, and neo-avant-garde lenses.

Including several works from the Museum’s Permanent Collection identified in connection with the concept of indigenismo, the exhibition will feature significant international loans, and works by Diego Rivera (Mexico), Tarsila do Amaral (Brazil), contemporary artists Cildo Meireles (Brazil) and Robert Smithson (United States), among others prominent figures. This exhibition is curated by Mariana Botey, Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Arts, University of California San Diego, and Amy Galpin, Curator, Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, and will include an accompanying catalogue. This is first time The San Diego Museum of Art has participated in or received funding for PST.

“We are thrilled to participate in Pacific Standard Time. This is a monumental opportunity for our institution to contribute to the research of Latin American art and to reflect on the significant and ever-evolving relationship between our region and Latin America.” says Roxana Velázquez, Maruja Baldwin Executive Director of The San Diego Museum of Art.

The University Galleries at the University of San Diego will mount the first exhibition ever in the United States devoted to Brazilian and Argentinian artists who used Xerox machines to create innovative works of art. “This practice flourished between 1970 and 1980 during a time when military dictatorships curtailed much of the artistic freedom in these countries,” explained Derrick Cartwright, Director of University Galleries. While it was particularly strong in Brazil and Argentina, it was also popular around the world including in the United States where it was called “Copy Art” and France where it was known as “Electrographie.” Xerox art held appeal as a new medium and also because of its highly reproducible nature. Artists experimented with photocopiers, fax machines and teletext, exploring the intersection between art and forms of communication.

USD will bring together some 75 representative works by the leading artists associated with this informal “movement” and will compare their imagery with the work of artists in related media in California at the same time. “Xerox art is rare, due to its fundamentally ephemeral qualities and what little remains of it tends to be held in archives or in the artists’ personal collections,” Cartwright said. “We expect to publish a definitive, scholarly catalogue that will both document and contextualize Xerox art in Latin America. No such publication exists in English today.” Cartwright and Erin Aldana, an independent scholar, are co-curating the project for the University Galleries. This is the first time that USD has been funded by the Getty.

"We admire the Getty's leadership in sponsoring this research about Latin American art and its inevitable nexus with California,” Cartwright said. ”This is a major undertaking with tremendous potential to generate new knowledge. USD is privileged to participate in Pacific Standard Time and we look forward to welcoming visitors to our campus and to the region more broadly."

Founded in 1941, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) is the preeminent contemporary visual arts institution in San Diego County. The Museum's collection includes more than 4,500 works of art created since 1950. In addition to presenting exhibitions by international contemporary artists, the Museum serves thousands of children and adults annually at its varied education programs, and offers a rich program of film, performance, and lectures. MCASD is a private, nonprofit organization, with 501c3 tax-exempt status; it is supported by generous contributions and grants from MCASD Members and other individuals, corporations, foundations, and government agencies. Hugh M. Davies is The David C. Copley Director and CEO at MCASD. Institutional support for MCASD is provided by the City of San Diego Commission for Arts and Culture. www.mcasd.org

About MOPA

MOPA is a center for visual learning, passionately dedicated to sharing and exploring the universal language of photography, film and video. Learn more at MOPA.org.

About The San Diego Museum of ArtThe San Diego Museum of Art is located at 1450 El Prado in Balboa Park, San Diego, Calif., 92101. General Information: 619.232.7931, Group Sales: 619.696.1935, Website, Twitter: @SDMA, Facebook.

Providing a rich and diverse cultural experience, The San Diego Museum of Art houses the world’s finest art in America’s Finest City. Located in the heart of Balboa Park, the Museum’s nationally renowned collections include Spanish and Italian old masters, South Asian paintings including the Edwin Binney 3rd Collection of Indian paintings, and 19th and 20th century American paintings and sculptures. The Museum regularly features major exhibitions of art from around the world, as well as an extensive year-round schedule supporting cultural and educational programs for children and adults. At The San Diego Museum of Art, exhibition text is always in English and Spanish.

About the USD Galleries

USD’s culture is enhanced by the presence of three distinctive fine art and anthropology display spaces. This site serves as a portal to their activities— exhibitions, collections, lectures, and other opportunities to experience professional museum contexts on campus. Providing our community with direct access to the finest things that men and women have created is the mission of the University Galleries. USD is a Catholic institution of higher learning committed to teaching, the liberal arts, the formation of values and the creation of ethical leaders. Chartered in 1949, the school enrolls approximately 8,300 undergraduate and graduate full-time equivalent students. The university’s eight academic divisions include the College of Arts and Sciences, the schools of Business Administration, Engineering, Law, Leadership and Education Sciences, Nursing and Health Sciences, Peace, and the Division of Professional and Continuing Education.